Note taking is a big topic among educators. How do we teach it to our students? What are the best methods? Is digital note taking worse than taking your notes on a piece of paper?
[bctt tweet=”Note taking is a big topic among educators. How do we teach it to students? What are the best methods?”]
I am a big advocate to “if I want to teach it, I have to experience it”. Below, you will find my documentation of note taking methods I have used (at conferences) over the years (2003-2015). From solitary notes on paper to digital sketchnotes shared on Twitter and this blog.
The evolution of my notes seems worthy to document, since I am excited of what is to come next. It also gave me a chance to look at:
- the level of substitution, in terms of analog going digital (no functional change)
- the level of transformation, in terms of amplification, shareability, hyperlinked writing, usage of different areas of the brain, etc.
Taking notes at a conference, looked like the one I took at a World Language conference around the year 2003. See the photo below. This was years before I started blogging and tweeting.
Then my blog came around and I started to share my notes a well as blog live during sessions, see below the example from 2008 and notice the lack of any hyperlinks beyond to the presenter’s website and a book recommendation on Amazon.
Not far behind came my note taking via my own Twitter Feed (also 2008). Notice the lack of the use of a hashtag to string other tweets together. ( Hashtags were introduced to Twitter in July 2009) 
I have documented my note taking style at conferences through time:
- Documenting Presentations- Blog and Twitter Style (2009)
- Twittering at a Conference (2010)
- A Visual Reflection of a New Kind of Conference (2012)
- Note- Taking Learnflow of a Conference Workshop (2014)
In April of 2014, I started experimenting with Sketchnoting. I am wrapping my mind around, not necessarily WHAT to sketchnote, but around the benefits of sketchnoting AS *something* . I looked at sketchnoting as a form of reflection and know am looking at Sketchnoting as a tool for Note Taking.
The three examples below are my notes from the keynotes at ASCD Camp Connect21 from this past week. Other sketchnoting examples from different conferences: BLC 2015, Making Learning Visible, Miami Device 2014, GIN Conference, AASSA- Educators’ Conference 2015.
I have noticed the following as part of the process of sketchnoting as note taking:
- doodling/sketching my notes makes me remember the content better and longer
- the act of “coloring” (filling in block letters or objects) gives me time to think deeper and longer about the meaning.
- choosing colors adds another dimension of organization, hierarchy and connectivity between concepts and ideas.
- the act of thinking about the visual representation of a point or concept adds depth to understanding that point or concept.
- choosing strategic arrows and connectors help make sense of an overall message and ” how is this related to a bigger picture?”
[bctt tweet=”As part of the process of sketchnoting as note taking: doodling/sketching my notes makes me remember the content better and longer”]
I believe there is room for all kinds of note taking methods for ourselves and for our students. We (teachers & students) just need to have several methods in our toolbox and experiment with the ones, we might not have had exposure to in order to be aware of potential benefits.
How has your note taking evolution looked like?
[bctt tweet=”How has your note taking evolution looked like?”]
Sylvia, I love this! I so do enjoy reading your work! I am a notetaker. I do not memorize well, it takes great effort, so I rely on taking notes and/or being able to find information quickly once I’ve learned it or learned about it. I can see my own progression in notetaking in this post I just haven’t evolved to sketchnoting, which is why I’m so enjoying reading and learning about your sketchnoting journey. I struggle with drawing even worse than I struggle with memorizing! 🙂
I do want to share this with my students because just because I struggle with sketchnoting I want those who are good at it to go for it and maybe help me along my way!
I teach a college class on MS Office. I have tried many forms of note taking myself and want to expose students to possibilities. I took notes in DOS, Windows, PCs and now tablets. Stylus use on a screen seems a high point for me. One Note? Evernote? Windows Journal? I just loved PCOutline on a MS DOS computer–Toshiba laptop cerca 1990. Never have found a suitable Windows substitute. Ecco was great and disappeared. Lotus Grandview — 1983 was excellent. But as a chemistry teacher I need to draw atoms, molecules and handwrite equations 2H2O => 2H2 + O2 does NOT cut it. Superscripts and subscripts are tough in text.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about note taking. Note taking is different for each person and they are always changing as you have demonstrated. I tell my students that they can take their own notes in anyway they like. I had one student that would create doodles throughout class and I thought she was not paying attention until one day she showed me what she was doing and they were fantastic mind maps of each lecture we did in class. She would share them with me and I would put them up on the class website for other class members to see. Each student learns a different way and as a teacher we should not demand one way as the only way.